One of my more recent binds is this absolutely fantastic CodyWan fic by @anaclastic-azurite here on Tumblr. I bound two copies, one for myself and one for them. A couple things are unique about these binds for me, and they explain the small differences between the two covers.
Both have a full leather cover, and I mixed machine tooling the text (using my silhouette and foil quill) with hand tooling the sun using traditional brass hand tools. Because I was machine tooling the title, I cheated and foiled the whole thing off the book, and I was lucky there didn’t seem to be any distortion when applying the leather to the boards. But it also gave me this nice effect where the tooling goes around the edges of the book and across the hinges without interruption.
For the hand tooling, I had taken a class last summer, made some tools for myself over Christmas, and this was my first attempt at using them to apply hot stamping foil. The round tools I made myself, and I accidentally used different sizes of dots on the two covers.
The leather and endpapers both came from an auction over a year ago, leaving them a mystery as to their type or origin. I think the leather might be cow, rather than the goat I usually use. It was pretty much impossible to pare, but it was fairly thin (possibly pre-split?) and took foil so beautifully I almost didn’t care.
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This is a reprise of the first glimmerglanger fic (and first star wars fic) I ever bound several years ago, as a gift for @mourningmountainsbindery. It was much earlier in my bookbinding journey, and you can tell! This time I had found some awesomely dramatic photo manips by @nobie which they allowed me to use for a dust jacket! I really enjoyed the effect from their addition.
I printed this on 28 lb linen finish paper which made it a very pleasing chonk. It also got silk endbands, crepaldi endpapers, a three color speckled edge, and colibri bookcloth with the title foiled in mando'a. Typeset is still my original version, but it got some better margins by virtue of printing it on legal quarto instead of letter quarto!
So a couple days ago, some folks braved my long-dormant social media accounts to make sure I’d seen this tweet:
And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.
So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years. These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing. They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it. It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face. Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing. And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc. NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.
Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres. What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female. I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one. They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO. If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone. Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered. I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.
I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all. I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole. That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three. And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.
And it changed the face of costuming. People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries. And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.
So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart. This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.
(Oh, and for anyone wondering: yes, I’m over 40 now, and yes, I’m still making costumes. And that armor is still in great shape after 17 years in a hot attic!)
In 2018 I developed a method to bind fanfiction into hardback books. Like penwiper, I was also literally working in my kitchen by myself and trying things out. This solo work was a meditative experience that allowed me to think deeply about the implications of what I was creating and what my ethics and philosophy should be. I got around to the idea that the knowledge I was building should be spread far and wide, so that together, many of us fans could bind all the wonderful fics that made our lives better in a million tiny ways, and wherever possible, create a copy to give to the authors themselves. In 2019 I wrote How to Make a Book From An AO3 Page, a free manual for how to format and bind fanfic, as a gift to fandom as a whole. It took off during the 2020 lockdown and has been going strong ever since.
Now, through the efforts of so many wonderful people, Renegade Bookbinding Guild has developed out of the Discord server I originally created just to answer questions about paper, fonts, printers and such. I figured there would be no more than 15 people joining. We have surpassed 3000.
I hope in another 20 years time my little tutorial still be kicking along out here, my bad photography and potty mouth sitting forever at the foundational level of an exploding practice of radical generosity and community, preserving the best of fanfiction from the ravages of time and digital threats and censorship, and giving authors the best thank you I know how to give.
Please don’t write fanfic with AI. I read fanfic to escape the AI generated prose that I have to read and then fail students for because they forget to remove statements like “ChatGPT makes mistakes” and leave blatantly hallucinated quotations. You may be better at hiding that you use AI than they are, but you kill my braincells just as much.
It's taken me more than a year to make this post. And it would have taken even longer, except I realized that what was holding me back now was wanting it to be perfect, which, let's face it, will never happen. So I am here to tell you about my friend @zulufic, about the amazing people of @renegadeguild, the Renegade Bookbinding Guild, and about fandom and community and how sometimes we really do get it right.
Zulu was my fandom and irl friend, and there is no good way to say this, she died of cancer a year and a half ago. She was family. She and my wife and I knew each other for twenty years, a significant part of our adult lives. Were at each other's weddings (her wedding to @belldreams was only a dozen people), travelled to cons, and helped each other move. She spent an unplanned week camping out in our living room one summer, as we torrented Stargate Atlantis, modded a House big bang from our living room couch, marathoned six degrees of actor separation media with us. Fell in and out of fandoms around each other, large and small. Witnessed each other's families and relationships and lives grown and change.
When I started fanbinding, I made her a pamphlet of her crackfic for Christmas. It was right around the time we found out she first had cancer. Surgery, chemo, and then we had another two years with her. She fell into another fandom, hard. I made her an anthology of her A League Of Their Own fic--all that she'd written at the time, at least. ("Would… you make a book of my fic?" she said when she saw my first casebound books. I never want to forget the way she said my name when she was asking me for something that was a foregone conclusion. "That was already the plan for Christmas," I told her.) I bound her rarepair House mpreg crackfic the next year, because that's what friends do. I didn't finish it until the spring--and then we found out the cancer was back.
She asked me for a favour over that summer. "Soooo… could you do something for me? Could you do another pamphlet, of this particular fic?" Yes, I said, yes I will. I will make you a pamphlet. I will make you TWELVE pamphlets. A HUNDRED AND TWENTY pamphlets, and more. (Spoiler alert, I did not make a hundred and twenty pamphlets, but I did make multiple copies of three.)
Here's the thing. She was on the prolific side, as a fic writer, and had been in fandom for decades. I wanted to bind more of her fic than I could possibly accomplish in time. I recognized there were finite amount of things I can finish while she was still here to see it, and that if I had tried to make this the only project I had, I would have collapsed under my own sadness.
That week, I said to a good fanbinding friend, I want to bind more of Zulu's fic, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. Her response: "Can I help? Do you want me to typeset something?" Me: (ALL THE EMOTION) "… yes. But also, I was thinking of asking the Renegade guild if anyone else would be bind a few of her fic, too, maybe a few quick pamphlets?" Her: "YES, do it."
I did it. I posted. She immediately started a spreadsheet organizing what I'd already bound, and to let other people sign up for things, and put herself first on the list. The fact that someone else was organizing for me (made a SPREADSHEET!) made me a bit weepy. By the time I went to bed an hour later, I think we had half a dozen people signed up to participate.
I should have been prepared for the full force of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild members, otherwise known as the inhabitants of the enabling server.
The next morning came. And a few more people signed up. I tentatively suggested that if anyone wanted to include a card or note and maybe some stickers for her wife and their kiddo L, it would be welcome. And people started asking me questions. Like, what fic does she like best? Where should we start? Can we make a care package? What does her wife need?
Knowing the people in the server, and their general kindness and enthusiasm, I should not have been surprised, I really shouldn't. It just hits differently when you're the one who's the recipient, you know? "I don't know why you're surprised," said another friend. "You asked us to help and we're helping!" And it wasn't an official guild project, just an incredible act of community and compassion. And immense enthusiasm and zero restraint.
I started asking some surreptitious questions of Zulu and Bell. I'd asked Zulu a few weeks before about granting blanket permission for anyone to bind her fic, and for the typesets to be shared. I casually said, "Sooo I mentioned this to the fanbinding group. If someone does want to send you something, can I share your address? And can I suggest they send cards/stickers to L?" (Yes, and yes.)
We started a separate thread in the Discord server to keep up with the planning. Some collaborations started to come up. I'll typeset from South Africa or southeast Asia or from next door in the next US state, you print and bind, we'll collect some of the American books for a mass mailing to Canada. I don't have time to bind, but I can contribute to shipping costs. I don't know that fandom, but I can take your typeset, and make a copy. I love that fandom but don't have time and materials, but I'll typeset if you bind. At this point, there were more than thirty people involved. New-old fandoms were discovered. Techniques and experiments grew.
I told Bell a little bit. She knew there were books coming. I didn't let her know the full scope, but I figured she could use something good to look forward to. Zulu said one of her goals was to finish all her WIPs before she died. (That hurt my heart. She almost made it! But even at the end, she got distracted by a new fic idea...)
The behind the scenes binding continued. There was negotiating over obscure fandoms, and exclamations over fic for niche favourites. A need for a great deal of baseball theming because Zulu wrote a LOT of ALOTO fic in the last few years. There were anthologies and pamphlets, and tiny books, and large chonks, and an entire collection of every drabble Zulu ever wrote in House fandom.
There was a 100-word hockey RPF drabble bound in a one-page folio with metallic foil details. There was a whole-fandom slipcased pamphlet set of her handful of Friday Night Lights fic. There were Buffy and X-Files fic unearthed from deep in her backlist. There were several bonkers-ambitious binds of her SMAUs, social media AUs of tweets and screenshots that had me throw up my hands and exclaim "how am I supposed to typeset this?"
There were obscure Canadian fandoms encased in the fanciest of marbled paper pamphlets, and a House fic about stolen lunches bound in a brown paper bag. A flower-titled ALOTO fic with a cover patterned like a seed packet. A Yuletide obscure movie fic in silk moire. Firefly fic with a marbled paper inset, and a Stargate Atlantis fic with a vellum dustcover. A crackfic five things fic with a metallic paper DVD on the cover as a Chinese stab binding, from a fandom that needed MOAR LENS FLARE. ("I am sure you know this, Luna," said the binder working on it, "but Zulu is really fucking funny." Yes, yes she absolutely was.)
I can't name every single book because there were more than FORTY of them, but I love every one of them and the care that went into them.
I told you Renegade goes hard.
We drove to nearby city to see Zulu and Bell in August, 2024. They'd just changed up her pain medication and she was having a good day. We had a good visit. I put the pamphlet fic in her hands myself. They'd told her in June that she should expect about a year at most. It would only be three months. That was the last time I saw her in person.
We moved up the projected mailing date from mid-October to mid-September.
We knew, over the September long weekend, when the group chat went quiet, that it wasn't a good sign. I'd kept up a steady stream of pet pictures and other small bits of news. As the summer ended, we had fewer responses from her, and were more likely to just get an emoji back. Morning glory flowers only bloom for a day, and they were blooming outside my back door. I started sending a picture of that morning's flowers to the group chat each day. (And cat pictures. Of course.) I don't know if anyone but me really cared about the morning glories, but it felt like something tangible to hold onto.
The first few envelopes and boxes started to arrive. There were cards and stickers and handknit slippers, and a science facts zine just for L. I told Bell, tell Zulu we love her. And that I'm not sorry I unleashed 30+ fanbinders on her AO3 account.
Bell: (lists off the books that had arrived.)
Me: Oh, so the group shipment from California isn't there yet. Plus at least three other packages I know about.
Bell: Holy shites
Several lovely people found my name in the acknowledgements of more than one fic, and sent me copies, too. (Twenty years in fandom together…) I cried.
We knew things weren't good when Bell emailed to set up a time for a video chat. A few days after the September long weekend, we talked to them face to face, to get the news that they were moving Zulu into hospice care the next day. It would be the last time we'd hear her voice. We knew it was coming, it just all went so much more quickly than expected. She died less than three weeks later.
(But take a look at the dates on the last fic on her AO3 account. In such typical fandom fashion, she was updating her last fic from her hospice bed. A direct quote from Zulu: "The most important thing once I'm there, of course, will be to sort out the wifi situation.")
So, timelines got bumped up by another week. There was a rush for mailing. One international package from Europe got returned to sender without leaving the country due to post office shenanigans, and had to make a return trip, too late for Zulu. The package from Japan made it. The big group shipment box was sent via overnight delivery. It was supposed to arrive on Tuesday. It showed up on Friday, the day that she died, after she was gone. But by that last week, I'm not sure how much Zulu would have taken in about it, honestly. Bell took it with her to supper that night with friends and family to open as a special treat.
There were more than forty books of all sizes all told, from more than thirty people, and I still have about four more in progress myself right now, though I'll never get to put them in Zulu's hands and see her grin and say "Aww, you GUYS…"
But we flooded her with books of her own fic. We deluged her family with her words and love.
The books were on display at her memorial service, along with the quilt that her ALOTO friends had made for her. Also, the jersey she got printed based on her own fic (such a dork, I say with the world's most affection.) The books were all over the front of the room, and it wasn't even all of them. Zulu's mom sent a heartfelt thank you card to be shared with the whole group. The memorial also included earl grey tea and shrimp (two of Zulu's favourites) and a video message recorded to her from one of the actors from A League of Their Own (which I am sure confused many people, but we knew what was up!)
The second group shipment arrived with me several months later, and at least one more book came to me in person at the Renegade retreat, and Bell has them all in a bookcase together. I still have a few more to finish right now.
And, Renegade being Renegade, a couple of people have eyed Zulu's AO3 account and said, "Well, we didn't manage to bind ALL her 350 fic… so far…" And I laughed until I cried, and I am still hugging you all right now Renegade, SO HARD. And you've left a legacy, and you've made a difference. There are no thank you's that are enough. The love is stored in the fanbinds.
I've asked anyone who wants to share what they made to tag it #fanbindsforzulu. If you want to see some amazing things, check out the tag. And if you want to read her fic, and if you want to bind it, she would have loved that, and I would love to see it, too. And tell your friends you love them.
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All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!
Here’s the list of who’s running the week 1 workshops:
Beginner's Primer: Bookbinding Vocabulary and Parts of the Book: @silentsunpress
Workshop Safety: catz
Makin' the VIP Work for You!: @simply-sithel
Endbands (French Double Core): @celestial-sphere-press
Designing a Book in Affinity 3 (Beginner): @kate2kat
Typesetting in Microsoft Powerpoint: mahoganydoodles
Last fall, I bound a lot of books to give as gifts! Two were for my niece, and I bound legal folio copies of Winnie the Pooh and The House on Pooh Corner!
These are, of course, classic works of Children’s literature and out of copyright. I’d bound Winnie the Pooh as legal quartos before, but I wanted a bigger format for these. Unfortunately, I bound them several months apart and gave the first one to my niece before I made the second one, so they aren’t exactly matching, but they are close!
The covers are a Neenah cover material, with hot foil decorations. I really love how they turned out.
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been binding, but not posting, but now all the gifts have been given so maybe I’ll go back and post some pics shortly. In the meantime, have some pics of my first bind of the year, Leslie_Knope’s great Teen Wolf baseball AU, The Payoff Pitch.
I bound this is blue leather I bought off a guy down the street who had trained at the North Bennet Street School in Boston, but has since turned to other art and isn’t bookbinding anymore. (It’s crazy who you end up living next to in a big city!). It’s an on-boards binding, which I’m not sure I like as a style. Not bad, just not my favorite.
The book was my was also first attempt at leather onlays, and my leather choices were both limited and poor, so it didn’t come out quite as well as I might have hoped.
The endpapers are paste papers I made myself a while back. The typeset was a lot of fun to do—this was my first time doing text messages actually formatted as such.
The first flower Obi-Wan hacked up on the bridge of the newly-named Negotiator was a marigold. Thankfully, this one didn’t come with roots—those were always the worst, leaving his throat sore or abraded for days after—and was relatively small. He’d felt the rattle in his lungs when as he’d first walked through the shining halls of the Venator, the soft-spun stoppage of petals and stem in his chest.
Due to my move causing a book binding hiatus, I decided to do a project to get back into things where I didn't need to do the typeset. @mourningmountainsbindery made this beautiful typeset for @catboydogma's great codywan hanahaki AU, and serendipitously I had done a painted silk class with @aetherseer when she visited me in Japan a while ago, resulting in a very pretty flower design - so! Put the two things together made bookcloth out of my silk.
This is a wonderful fic series, and I particularly like how in this AU hanahaki disease is not fatal, and more based on one's own feelings than whether it's reciprocated.
I also pulled out some of my floral chiyogami for cloth-jointed endpapers (mayhaps... i fucked up cutting the endpapers & thats why they are cloth jointed), and colored the edges with acrylic ink, and when there's so many Japanese components I have to sew the endbands in the Japanese silk, ofc.
It’s FFWAD time! This year for Fan Fic Writer’s Appreciation Day, I bound two fics by my dear friend @moscarific!
The first is their classic Firefly fic, Like Describing the Alphabet. (First published on LiveJournal!)
Firefly was the fandom that we first bonded over the year I started grad school, though we shared many after that. This is a Legal Quarto, bound in Scotch Duo with HTV decorations and my own marbled paper.
The second book I bound for them was their X-Men fanfic, It’s Only Castles Burning.
This one is also a Legal Quarto, bound in Polar Duo with HTV decorations and my own marbled paper.
As always, please take today to go show your appreciation for the fanfic writers who've made YOUR fandom experience a great one!
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My project over the weekend was learning a new style of binding: the k118 binding. For a rare binding style, I thought it appropriate to go with a rare-pair fic, Trade Your Heart for Bones to Know by @blackkatmagic .
The K118 is a medieval tightback style that only has two known medieval exemplars (iirc), rediscovered a few decades ago by Bruce Levy, then a book conservationist at the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin. Unlike more common tightback styles, it does not require either backing or lacing on of boards (though you can do the lacing if you choose). It’s most visible defining feature is that it has a neat party trick of being able to open so completely that the boards can touch and nearly lay flat against each other.
More recently, @spockandawe and @notwhelmedyet from the Renegade Bookbinding discord server have been popularizing this binding style. I’ve been wanting to do one for about 2 years, and finally screwed up my courage.
The cover is green leather with some of my own marbled paper, which I also used for the end papers. The endbands are green and brown trebizond silk. The cover and title page image is my own modification of some free svgs to make something that would represent Jaster and Jon. Fonts are Anat and Coelecanth.
My brother in law is a huge fan of Stephen King, and the last time I was over I noticed his copy of Pet Sematary was getting a bit ragged. So for his birthday, he’s getting a rebound copy!
I’m a bit addicted to this red neon slub bookcloth. The decorations are HTV.
Also, I’m in the process of working with a bunch of Renegade bookbinders to custom order a large quantity of @renato-crepaldi ‘s gorgeous marbled papers, so I decided it was time to use up part of my existing stash.
I continue in my quest to bind all of Astolat’s fic in the fandoms I read! This is another GOT fic, but a Regency Romance AU.
The cloth jointed endpapers and cover inset are hot foiled, but the spine text and my logo are HTV because it turns out this Japanese book cloth does not take foiling well! I modeled the title page after the 1697 edition of Dryden’s translation of Virgil (yes, I’m that kind of nerd), hand painted the red because I still don’t have a color printer, and I used IM Fell as my primary font. The images of swords and pistols come from public domain photos of appropriate weaponry that I digitally traced and edited. Endbands are a simple bead on front with silk.
As always, Astolat, if you would like a copy let me know!
The third of Dr. Epitomereally’s graduation presents! Like epitomereally, I love LA, and this fic is just grounded in the real places of the city (including a few of my own haunts).
This book’s design started with the title page. LA at sunset, with that photograph, gave me the idea for the ombre color cloth and my own paste paper endpapers, which are purple at the top and dark blue at the bottom. The city skyline on the cover also serves as the section dividers, and I traced it from an actual photo of one of LA’s many skylines.
I also did cloth jointed endpapers, which are really growing on me as a technique. The end bands are silk—mostly two-bead on front, but I cheated and slipped in a little orange at the center. Then, for each chapter, the opener is a photo from the actual places mentioned in the book. And, of course, I had to include the playlist epitomereally put together for the fic.
Book 2 of my project binding @epitomereally ‘s fic as a graduation gift! This lovely little Drarry Christmas time-loop fic has a leather spine with hot foil titling, and then pepperoni duo with HTV on the cover.
The endbands are silk, the book edges are speckled red and green, and I used a red and gold Italian Letterpress paper for the endpapers. I tried to go really hard on the Christmas theme but without getting tacky about it, and I think I succeeded!
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Fanbinding(ish): Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
You've heard of the quarto-legal. Now get ready for the...
Quatro Legal
(ramen for scale.)
Okay. So. Context. For understandable reasons, people regularly say "quatro" when they mean "quarto," when talking about page size. (It's what it sounds like: a quarto is a quarter of a page.) @mourningmountainsbindery @zhalfirin-binds @ficcinghell and I were wondering what a "quatro legal" would actually look like, and decided it would have to be four legal sheets in a 2x2 grid.
So this book is 28" tall, and 17" wide.
I printed it on a large format printer a friend of mine was kindly willing to give me access to, and it's folded accordion style--looks like this when it's fully extended:
and the covers are chip board, though if I did it again I'd shell out for proper davey board, because I ended up spending way more time on the cover than I'd planned.
Here it is at the @renegadeguild retreat, with @mourningmountainsbindery's quarto legal, for scale:
Process pictures and videos under the cut.
So the first question was, how to get the cover on. Because PVA dries fast. I didn't want to use paste, because I was afraid the water would fuck up the boards, but in the time it would take to get glue on the whole board, the first glue would have already started to dry.
The answer:
dumping some glue onto the board, and slowly unrolling the fabric while my girlfriend frantically went ahead with a silicone scraper. So basically, curling.
For decoration, the first thing I knew I wanted to do was make a glow-in-the dark cheshire cat, so I started off by putting lines of masking tape up next to each other, drawing the design on with a sharpie, and then cutting on said lines to make a stencil. I then thought the cover looked a little empty, so I added the title. (Intermittently adding additional layers of glow in the dark paint.)
Then I peeled the tape off and the edges were a little wonkier in places than I'd hoped for. So, obviously, I had to do an outline. And I had all this imitation gold that I'd failed to make work on the page edges of my Good Omens bind, so obviously....
This also ended up requiring a ton of touch-ups: I just did the gilding adhesive directly onto the book cloth, which isn't the recommended method but I didn't trust my ability to keep my hand steady enough for primer. I did have to do two layers. (Pictured above is a bit of gilding adhesive waiting to be dry enough to put more gold on. It takes half an hour or so, and then the sealant that goes on top takes 4 hours to fully cure. So I did not do this on every single letter, though I considered it for one insane second.)
The endpapers are butcher paper a teacher friend kindly stole obtained for me. Getting them on required another frantic glue fest, with the assistance of @eebeesee, who was very nice about it.
Obviously, it was too big for the press. So here it is under a piece of chipboard, the glass top of the coffee table (surprisingly heavy,) 50lbs of dumbells, and then, for good measure, my actual book press plonked on top. Also required the assistance of eebee because keeping all of that aligned was kind of a four-arm operation.
The chipboard still warped a bit because, again, it's chipboard.
Eventually I'm going to make an actual quarto legal with the same cover so it can be compared to its mini-me.
Late last year, my dear friend epitomereally did two amazing things: she became Dr. Epitomereally, and she wrote this fic.
As a graduation present, I decided to bind three of her fanfic for her, starting with this fic that I had begged her for permission to bind while I was getting a sneak peek as a beta reader as she was writing for @hderised . I kept the fact that she was going to be getting all three books a secret, and this weekend I got to give them to her at the Renegade retreat! (Pics of the other two will come soon).
Pillar of Salt is a dark, Draco-focused fic, with the central plot involving a morphed form of the mirror of Erised, and so mirrors are the main imagery in this bind.
This book was bound in black goatskin (a particularly stiff but easily skived instance), with foil quill decorations. The endpapers are perhaps my most subtle paste papers with gunmetal paste over plack paper. The edges are painted black and then splattered with the same gunmetal grey. The endbands are trebizond silk.
The title page was toner foil on black paper.
Epitomereally is a brilliant writer, and it was my enormous pleasure to bind this fic for her!
